The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe - the site that stunned archaeologists

Circles of elaborately carved stones from about 9,500BC predate even agriculture

Nicholas Birch in Istanbul The Guardian, Wednesday April 23 2008

As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet.

"This place is a supernova," said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."

Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-coloured sea, stretches south hundreds of miles. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.

Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

"Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilisations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of anthropology who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's best known neolithic site, since 1993. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time."

With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavation, Gobekli Tepe's significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think it was the centre of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the centre of each circle representing a man and woman. It is a theory the tourist board in nearby Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet; see Adam and Eve.

Schmidt is sceptical. He agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy", and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning.

But the site is devoid of the fertility symbols found at other neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless.

"I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods," said Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers.

"In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all. What is this universe? Why are we here?"

With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes the hilltop was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles. The tallest stones all face south-east, as if scanning plains that are scattered with contemporary sites in many ways no less remarkable than Gobekli Tepe.

Last year, for instance, French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara in northern Syria uncovered the oldest mural ever found. "Two square metres of geometric shapes, in red, black and white - like a Paul Klee painting", said Eric Coqueugniot, of the University of Lyon, who is leading the excavation.

Coqueugniot describes Schmidt's hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was a meeting point for rituals as "tempting", given its spectacular position. But surveys of the region were still in their infancy. "Tomorrow, somebody might find somewhere even more dramatic."

Vecihi Ozkaya, the director of a dig at Kortiktepe, 120 miles east of Urfa, doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500-year-old graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.

"Look at this", he said, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. South-eastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilisation."

Göbekli Tepe (Turkish for "Hill with a Stomach") is a hilltop sanctuary built on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge about 15km northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa (Urfa) in southeast Turkey.

The site, currently undergoing excavation by German and Turkish archaeologists, was erected by hunter-gatherers in the 10th millennium BC (ca 11,500 years ago), before the advent of sedentism.

It is currently considered the oldest known shrine or temple complex in the world, and the planet's oldest known example of monumental architecture. Together with the site of Nevalı Çori, it has revolutionised the understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic.

Göbekli Tepe had already been located in a survey in 1964, when the American archaeologist Peter Benedict mentioned the site as a possible location of stone age activity, but its import-ance was not recognised at that time.

Excavations have been conducted since 1994 by the German Archaeological Institute (Istanbul branch) and Şanlıurfa Museum, under the direction of the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt (University of Heidelberg). Scholars from the University of Karlsruhe are documenting the archi-tectural remains. Before then, the hill had been under agricultural cultivation; generations of local inhabitants had frequently moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles. Much archaeo-logical evidence may have been destroyed in that process. The archaeologists recognised that the prominent rise could not represent a natural hill.

Later, they discovered T-shaped pillars, some of which had apparently undergone attempts at smashing.

The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic. The oldest occupation layer (stratum III) contained monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures.

So far, four such buildings, with diameters between 10 and 30m have been uncovered. Geo-physical studies suggest 16 further structures.

The most recent layer consists of sediment deposited as the result of erosion and of agri-cultural activity.

The monoliths are decorated with carved relief of animals or of abstract pictograms. These signs cannot be classed as writing, but may represent commonly understood sacred symbols, as known from Neolithic cave paintings elsewhere.

Some of the pillars, namely the T-shaped ones, have carved arms, which may indicate that they represent stylised humans. The very carefully carved reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, snakes, other reptiles and birds. Whether their creators wanted to portray simply the local fauna or perhaps mythical beings remains unknown. The meaning of the picto-grams is equally unclear.

The PPN A settlement has been dated to ca. 9000 BC. There are remains of smaller houses from the PPN B and a few epipalaeolithic finds as well.

There are a number of radiocarbon dates (presented with one standard deviation errors and calibrations to BCE):

Lab-Number Date BP Cal BCE Context

Ua-19561 8430±80 7560-7370 enclosure C

Ua-19562 8960±85 8280-7970 enclosure B

Hd-20025 9452±73 9110-8620 Layer III

Hd-20036 9559±53 9130-8800 Layer III

The Hd samples are from charcoal in the lowest levels of the site and would date the active phase of occupation. The Ua samples come from pedogenic carbonate coatings on pillars and only indicate a time after the site was abandoned- the terminus ante quem.

The walls are made of unworked dry stone and include numerous T-shaped monolithic pillars of limestone that are up to 3 m high. Another, bigger pair of pillars is placed in the centre of the structure. The floors are made of terrazzo (burnt lime), and there is a low bench running along the whole of the exterior wall.

Some of the reliefs have been deliberately erased, maybe in preparation for new pictures. There are freestanding sculptures as well that may represent wild boars or foxes. As they are heavily encrusted with lime, it is sometimes difficult to tell.

Comparable statues have been discovered in Nevalı Çori and Nahal Hemar.

The quarries for the statues are located on the plateau itself, some unfinished pillars have been found there in situ. The biggest unfinished pillar is still 6.9 m long, a length of 9m has been reconstructed. This is much larger than any of the finished pillars found so far.

The stone was quarried with stone picks.

Bowl-like depressions in the limestone-rocks have maybe been used as mortars in the epipalaeo-lithic already. There are some phalloi and geometric patterns cut into the rock as well, and their dating is uncertain.

While the site formally belongs to the earliest Neolithic (PPN A), up to now no traces of domesticated plants or animals have been found.

The inhabitants were hunters and gatherers.

Schmidt speculates that the site played a key function in the transition to agriculture; he assumes that the necessary social organization needed for the creation of these structures went hand-in-hand with the organized exploitation of wild crops.

Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in structure to wild wheat found in a mountain (Karacadağ) 20 miles away from the site, leading one to believe that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated.

All statements about the site must be considered preliminary, as only about 1.5% of the site's total area have been excavated as yet; floor levels have only been reached in the second complex (complex B), which also contained a terrazzo-like floor.

Excavations so far have revealed very little evidence for residential use.

Through the radiocarbon method, the end of stratum III could be determined at circa 9,000 BC (see above); its beginnings are estimated to 11,000 BC or earlier. Stratum II dates to about 8,000 BC.

Thus, the complexes originated before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, ie the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry, which is assumed to begin after 9,000 BC.

But the construction of the Göbekli Tepe complex implies complex organisation of a degree of complexity not hitherto associated with pre-Neolithic societies. The archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the 10-20 ton pillars (in fact, some weigh up to 50 tons) from local quarries and move them 100 to 500m to the site.

For sustenance, wild cereals may have been used more intensely than so far; perhaps they were even deliberately cultivated. Residential buildings have not been discovered as yet, but there are some "special buildings" which may have served for ritual gatherings.

Around the beginning of the 8th millennium BC, "Navel Mountain" lost its importance.

The advent of agriculture and animal husbandry brought new circumstances to human life in the area. But the complex was not gradually abandoned and simply forgotten, to be obliterat-ed by the forces of nature over time. Instead, it was deliberately covered with 300 to 500 cubic metres of soil.

Why this happened is unknown, but it preserved the monuments for posterity.

At present, the complex raises more questions to archaeology and prehistory than it answers. For example, we cannot tell why more and more walls were gradually added to the interiors while the sanctuary was in use

Göbekli Tepe can be seen as an archaeological discovery of the greatest possible importance, since it profoundly changes our understanding of a vital point in the development of human societies.

Apparently, the **** of monumental cult complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been assumed hitherto. In other words, as Klaus Schmidt put it: "First came the temple, then the city".

This revolutionary hypothesis will have to be supported or modified by future research.

Schmidt considers Göbekli Tepe as a central place serving a cult of the dead. He suggests that the carved animals are there to protect the dead. However, no tombs or graves have been found so far. Schmidt sees the site in connection with the initial stages of an incipient Neolithic.

It is one of several neolithic sites in the vicinity of Mount Karaca Dağ, an area where geneti-cists suspect the origins of at least some of our cultivated grains (see Einkorn).

Such scholars suggest that the Neolithic revolution, i.e. the beginnings of grain cultivation, took place here. Schmidt and others believe that mobile groups in the area were forced to cooperate with each other to protect early concentrations of wild cereals from wild animals (herds of gazelles and wild donkeys). This would have led to an early social organization of various groups in the area of Göbekli Tepe.

Thus, according to Schmidt, the Neolithic did not begin at a small scale in the form of indivi-dual instances of garden cultivation, but started immediately as a large scale social orga-nisation ("a full-scale revolution'"'.

Not only its large dimensions, but the side-by-side existence of multiple pillar shrines makes the complex unique. There are no comparable monumental complexes from its time.

Nevalı Çori, a well-known Neolithic settlement also excavated by the German Archaeological Institute, and submerged by the Atatürk Dam since 1992, is 500 years later, its T-shaped pillars are considerably smaller, and its shrine was located inside a village; the roughly con-temporary architecture at Jericho is devoid of artistic merit or large-scale sculpture; and Çatalhöyük, perhaps the most famous of all Neolithic villages, is 2,000 years later.

The excavator, Klaus Schmidt, has engaged in some speculation regarding the belief systems of the groups that created Göbekli Tepe, based on comparisons with other shrines and settle-ments.

He assumes shamanic practices and suggests that the T-shaped pillars may represent mythi-cal creatures, perhaps ancestors, whereas he sees a fully articulated belief in gods only deve-loping later in Mesopotamia, associated with extensive temples and palaces.

This corresponds well with the Sumerian tradition of an old belief that agriculture, animal hus-bandry and weaving had been brought to humankind from the sacred mountain Du-Ku, which was inhabited by Annuna-deities, very ancient gods without individual names.

Klaus Schmidt identifies this story as an oriental primeval myth that preserves a partial memo-ry of the Neolithic. It is also apparent that the animal and other images are peaceful in charac-ter and give no indications of organised violence.